The partner shuffle

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Increasingly, Australians are setting up home not once, but several times in a lifetime, and will be doing a lot more of it in the future, Bernard Salt, a demographer, forecasts.

"I speculate that by 2050 we will have three partners in life, like we have three jobs," Mr Salt said. "It prompts the demand for household goods because with every change there's this tendency to say, 'I had that bedroom suite when I was with so-and-so. I don't want it any more - it reminds me of him."'

Mr Salt, a director of property at KPMG, believes Australians will start out with a "fun" relationship in their early 20s, someone "for travelling, for fun, for sex".

Then will come the "building" relationship, with marriage, mortgage and children, in the early 30s. Then comes the "wind-down", when we find a soulmate to share a sea change.

At the heart of this shift was the rising spending power, confidence and independence of women who were marrying later than ever, Mr Salt told a Mortgage Industry Association of Australia conference yesterday.

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"The reason why she is getting married later is because of a value shift," Mr Salt said. "She wants tertiary education, she wants to pay off HECS, travel overseas, establish and develop a career.

"She trials a number of relationships throughout her 20s then commits to marriage at 29, mortgage at 30 and children, perhaps, at 31 or indeed any time over the following decade."

But the director of the Centre for Population and Urban Research at Monash University, Bob Birrell, paints a different picture of women moving from relationship to relationship.

It was women without a tertiary education who were most likely to experience marriage breakdown, he said. One reason was that they were more likely to be married to men who were employed casually or part-time, causing economic stress.

"For degree-qualified women, the rate of marital breakdown has actually stabilised over the last few years," Dr Birrell said.

Mr Salt attributed the tendency to delay marriage to the culture espoused by Friends, the US TV comedy about a group of young people sharing a flat in Greenwich Village, New York.

That culture had been embraced by a young, urban, chic generation in areas such as South Sydney, Chapel Street in Melbourne, and Fortitude Valley in Brisbane.

Like the location of Friends, South Sydney had a high proportion of women aged 25 to 34 who had never married - 69 per cent - compared with 40 per cent for the rest of Sydney. In Greenwich Village the figure is 70 per cent, according to the US 2000 census.

This group would drive demand for an inner-city lifestyle, Mr Salt said.

"If you don't have a mortgage until 30, you need to be within a $15 cab fare of all the hottest clubs in the inner-city."